The Mckettrick Way

Whatever she thought, Brad finally concluded, that was all she was going to give up, and he had to be satisfied with it.

For now.

He started on the steak, but he hadn’t eaten more than two bites when there was a fuss at the entrance to the restaurant and Livie came storming in, striding right to his table.

Sparing a nod for Meg, Brad’s sister turned immediately to him. “He’s hurt,” she said. Her clothes were covered with straw and a few things that would have upset the health department, being that she was in a place where food was being served to the general public.

“Who’s hurt?” Brad asked calmly, sliding out of the booth to stand.

“Ransom,” she answered, near tears. “He got himself cut up in a tangle of rusty barbed wire. I’d spotted him with binoculars, but before I could get there to help, he’d torn free and headed for the hills. He’s hurt bad, and I’m not going to be able to get to him in the Suburban—we need to saddle up and go after him.”

“Liv,” Brad said carefully, “it’s dark out.”

“He’s bleeding, and probably weak. The wolves could take him down!” At the thought of that, Livie’s eyes glistened with moisture. “If you won’t help, I’ll go by myself.”

Distractedly, Brad pulled out his wallet and threw down the money for the dinner he and Meg hadn’t gotten a chance to finish.

Meg was on her feet, the salad forgotten. “Count me in, Olivia,” she said. “That is, if you’ve got an extra horse and some gear. I could go back out to the Triple M for Banshee, but by the time I hitched up the trailer, loaded him and gathered the tack—”

“You can ride Cinnamon,” Olivia told Meg, after sizing her up as to whether she’d be a help or a hindrance on the trail. “It’ll be cold and dark up there in the high country,” she added. “Could be a long, uncomfortable night.”

“No room service?” Meg quipped.

Livie spared her a smile, but when she turned to Brad again, her blue eyes were full of obstinate challenge. “Are you going or not—cowboy?”

“Hell, yes, I’m going,” Brad said. Riding a horse was a thing you never forgot how to do, but it had been a while since he’d been in the saddle, and that meant he’d be groaning-sore before this adventure was over. “What about the stock on the Triple M, Meg? Who’s going to feed your horses, if this takes all night?”

“They’re good till morning,” Meg answered. “If I’m not back by then, I’ll ask Jesse or Rance or Keegan to check on them.”

Livie led the caravan in her Suburban, with Brad following in his truck, and Meg right behind, in the Blazer. He was worried about Ransom, and about Livie’s obsession with the animal, but there was one bright spot in the whole thing.

He was going to get to spend the night with Meg McKettrick, albeit on the hard, half-frozen ground, and the least he could do, as a gentleman, was share his sleeping bag—and his body warmth.

“Right smart of you to go along,” Angus commented, appearing in the passenger seat of Meg’s rig. “There might be some hope for you yet.”

Meg answered without moving her mouth, just in case Brad happened to glance into his rearview mirror and catch her talking to nobody. “I thought you were giving me some elbow room on this one,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” Angus replied. “If you go to bed down with him or something like that, I’ll skedaddle.”

“I’m not going to ‘bed down’ with Brad O’Ballivan.”

Angus sighed. Adjusted his sweat-stained cowboy hat. Since he usually didn’t wear one, Meg read it as a sign bad weather was on its way. “Might be a good thing if you did. Only way to snag some men.”

“I will not dignify that remark with a reply,” Meg said, flooring the gas pedal to keep up with Brad, now that they were out on the open road, where the speed limit was higher. She’d never actually been to Stone Creek Ranch, but she knew where it was. Knew all about King’s Ransom, too. Her cousin Jesse, practically a horse-whisperer, claimed the animal was nothing more than a legend, pieced together around a hundred campfires, over as many years, after all the lesser tales had been told.

Meg wanted to see for herself.

Wanted to help Olivia, whom she’d always liked but barely knew.

Spending the night on a mountain with Brad O’Ballivan didn’t enter into the decision at all. Much.

“Is he real?” she asked. “The horse, I mean?”

Angus adjusted his hat again. “Sure he is,” he said, his voice quiet, but gruff. Sometimes a look came into his eyes, a sort of hunger for the old days and the old ways.

“Is there anything you can do to help us find him?”

Angus shook his head. “You’ve got to do that yourselves, you and the singing cowboy and the girl.”

“Olivia is not a girl. She’s a grown woman and a veterinarian.”

“She’s a snippet,” Angus said. “But there’s fire in her. That O’Ballivan blood runs hot as coffee brewed on a cook-stove in hell. She needs a man, though. The knot in her lasso is way too tight.”

“I hope that reference wasn’t sexual,” Meg said stiffly, “because I do not need to be carrying on that type of conversation with my dead multi-great grandfather.”

“It makes me feel old when you talk about me like I helped Moses carry the commandments down off the mountain,” Angus complained. “I was young once, you know. Sired four strapping sons and a daughter by three different women—Ellie, Georgia and Concepcion. And I’m not dead, neither. Just…different.”

Olivia had stopped suddenly for a gate up ahead, and Meg nearly rear-ended Brad before she got the Blazer reined in.

“Different as in dead,” Meg said, watching through the windshield, in the glow of her headlights, as Brad got out of his truck and strode back to speak to her, leaving the driver’s-side door gaping behind him.

He didn’t look angry—just earnest.

“If you want to ride with me,” he said when Meg had buzzed down her window, “fine. But if you’re planning to drive this rig up into the bed of my truck, you might want to wait until I park it in a hole and lower the tailgate.”

“Sorry,” Meg said after making a face.

Brad shook his head and went back to his truck. By then, Olivia had the gate open, and he drove ahead onto an unpaved road winding upward between the juniper and Joshua trees clinging to the red dirt of the hillside.

“What was that about?” Meg mused, following Brad and Olivia’s vehicles through the gap and not really addressing Angus, who answered, nonetheless.

“Guess he’s prideful about the paint on that fancy jitney of his,” he said. “Didn’t want you denting up his buggy.”

Meg didn’t comment. Angus was full of the nineteenth-century equivalent of “woman driver” stories, and she didn’t care to hear any of them.

They topped a rise, Olivia still in the lead, and dipped down into what was probably a broad valley, given what little Meg knew about the landscape on Stone Creek Ranch. Lights glimmered off to the right, revealing a good-size house and a barn.

Meg was about to ask if Angus had ever visited the ranch when he suddenly vanished.

She shut off the Blazer, got out and followed Brad and Olivia toward the barn. She wished it hadn’t been so dark—it would have been interesting to see the place in the daylight.

Inside the barn, which was as big as any of the ones on the Triple M and boasted all the modern conveniences, Olivia and Brad were already saddling horses.

“That’s Cinnamon over there,” Olivia said with a nod to a tall chestnut in the stall across the wide breezeway from the one she was standing in, busily preparing a palomino to ride. “His gear’s in the tack room, third saddle rack on the right.”

Meg didn’t hesitate, as she suspected Olivia had expected her to do, but found the tack room and Cinnamon’s gear, and lugged it back to his stall. Brad and his sister were already mounted and waiting at the end of the breezeway when Meg led the gelding out, however.

“Need a boost?” Brad asked, in a teasing drawl, saddle leather creaking as he shifted to step down from the big paint he was riding and help Meg mount up.

Cinnamon was a big fella, taller by several hands than any of the horses in Meg’s barn, but she’d been riding since she was in diapers, and she didn’t need a boost from a “singing cowboy,” as Angus described Brad.

“I can do it,” she replied, straining to grip the saddle horn and get a foot into the high stirrup. It was going to be a stretch.

In the next instant, she felt two strong hands pushing on her backside, hoisting her easily onto Cinnamon’s broad back.

Thanks, Angus, she said silently.

Chapter Four

It was a purely crazy thing to do, setting out on horseback, in the dark, for the high plains and meadows and secret canyons of Stone Creek Ranch, in search of a legendary stallion determined not to be found. It had been way too long since she’d done anything like it, Meg reflected, as she rode behind Olivia and Brad, on the borrowed horse called Cinnamon.

Olivia had brought a few veterinary supplies along, packed in saddle bags, and while Meg was sure Ransom, wounded or not, would elude them, she couldn’t help admiring the kind of commitment it took to set out on the journey anyway. Olivia O’Ballivan was a woman with a cause and for that, Meg envied her a little.

The moon was three-quarters full, and lit their way, but the trail grew steadily narrower as they climbed, and the mountainside was steep and rocky. One misstep on the part of a distracted horse and both animal and rider would plunge hundreds of feet into an abyss of shadow, to their very certain and very painful deaths.

When the trail widened into what appeared, in the thin wash of moonlight, to be a clearing, Meg let out her breath, sat a little less tensely in the saddle, loosened her grip on Cinnamon’s reins. Brad drew up his own mount to wait for her, while Olivia and her horse shot forward, intent on their mission.

“Do you think we’ll find him?” Meg asked. “Ransom, I mean?”

“No,” Brad answered, unequivocally. “But Livie was bound to try. I came to look out for her.”

Meg hadn’t noticed the rifle in the scabbard fixed to Brad’s saddle before, back at the O’Ballivan barn, but it stood out in sharp relief now, the polished wooden stock glowing in a silvery flash of moonlight. He must have seen her eyes widen; he patted the scabbard as he met her gaze.

“You’re expecting to shoot something?” Meg ventured. She’d been around guns all her life—they were plentiful on the Triple M—but that didn’t mean she liked them.

“Only if I have to,” Brad said, casting a glance in the direction Olivia had gone. He nudged his horse into motion, and Cinnamon automatically kept pace, the two geldings moving at an easy trot.

“What would constitute having to?” Meg asked.

“Wolves,” Brad answered.

Meg was familiar with the wolf controversy—environmentalists and animal activists on the one side, ranchers on the other. She wanted to know where Brad stood on the subject. He was well-known for his love of all things finned, feathered and furry—but that might have been part of his carefully constructed persona, like the notched bedpost and the trashed hotel rooms.

“You wouldn’t just pick them off, would you? Wolves, I mean?”

“Of course not,” Brad replied. “But wolves are predators, and Livie’s not wrong to be concerned that they’ll track Ransom and take him down if they catch the blood-scent from his wounds.”

A chill trickled down Meg’s spine, like a splash of cold water, setting her shivering. Like Brad, she came from a long line of cattle ranchers, and while she allowed that wolves had a place in the ecological scheme of things, like every other creature on earth, she didn’t romanticize them. They were not misunderstood dogs, as so many people seemed to think, but hunters, savagely brutal and utterly ruthless, and no one who’d ever seen what they did to their prey would credit them with nobility.

“Sharks with legs,” she mused aloud. “That’s what Rance calls them.”

Brad nodded, but didn’t reply. They were gaining on Olivia now; she was still a ways ahead, and had dismounted to look at something on the ground.

Both Brad and Meg sped up to reach her.

By the time they arrived, Olivia’s saddle bags were open beside her, and she was holding a syringe up to the light. Because of the darkness, and the movements of the horses, a few moments passed before Meg focused on the animal Olivia was treating.

A dog lay bloody and quivering on its side.

Brad was off his horse before Meg broke the spell of shock that had descended over her and dismounted, too. Her stomach rolled when she got a better look at the dog; the poor creature, surely a stray, had run afoul of either a wolf or coyote pack, and it was purely a miracle that he’d survived.

Meg’s eyes burned.

Brad crouched next to the dog, opposite Olivia, and stroked the animal with a gentleness that altered something deep down inside Meg, causing a grinding sensation, like the shift of tectonic plates far beneath the earth.

“Can he make it?” he asked Olivia.

“I’m not sure,” Olivia replied. “At the very least, he needs stitches.” She injected the contents of the syringe into the animal’s ruff. “I sedated him. Give the medicine a few minutes to work, and then we’ll take him back to the clinic in Stone Creek.”

“What about the horse?” Meg asked, feeling helpless, a bystander with no way to help. She wasn’t used to it. “What about Ransom?”

Olivia’s eyes were bleak with sorrow when she looked up at Meg. She was a veterinarian; she couldn’t abandon the wounded dog, or put him to sleep because it would be more convenient than transporting him back to town, where he could be properly cared for. But worry for the stallion would prey on her mind, just the same.

“I’ll look for him tomorrow,” Olivia said. “In the daylight.”

Brad reached across the dog, laid a hand on his sister’s shoulder. “He’s been surviving on his own for a long time, Liv,” he assured her. “Ransom will be all right.”

Olivia bit her lower lip, nodded. “Get one of the sleeping bags, will you?” she said.

Brad nodded and went to unfasten the bedroll from behind his saddle. They were miles from town, or any ranch house.

“How did a dog get all the way out here?” Meg asked, mostly because the silence was too painful.

“He’s probably a stray,” Olivia answered, between soothing murmurs to the dog. “Somebody might have dumped him, too, down on the highway. A lot of people think dogs and cats can survive on their own—hunt and all that nonsense.”

Meg drew closer to the dog, crouched to touch his head. He appeared to be some kind of lab-retriever mix, though it was hard to tell, given that his coat was saturated with blood. He wore no collar, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have a microchip—and if he did, Olivia would be able to identify him immediately, once she got him to the clinic. Though from the looks of him, he’d be lucky to make it that far.

Brad returned with the sleeping bag, unfurling it. “Okay to move him now?” he asked Olivia.

Olivia nodded, and she and Meg sort of helped each other to their feet. “You mount up,” Olivia told Brad. “And we’ll lift him.”

Brad whistled softly for his horse, which trotted obediently to his side, gathered the dangling reins, and swung up into the saddle.

Meg and Olivia bundled the dog, now mercifully unconscious, in the sleeping bag and, together, hoisted him high enough so Brad could take him into his arms. They all rode slowly back down the trail, Brad holding that dog as tenderly as he would an injured child, and not a word was spoken the whole way.

When they got back to the ranch house, where Olivia’s Suburban was parked, Brad loaded the dog into the rear of the vehicle.

“I’ll stay and put the horses away,” Meg told him. “You’d better go into town with Olivia and help her get him inside the clinic.”

Brad nodded. “Thanks,” he said gruffly.

Olivia gave Meg an appreciative glance before scrambling into the back of the Suburban to ride with the patient, ambulance-style. Brad got behind the wheel.

Once they’d driven off, Meg gathered the trio of horses and led them into the barn. There, in the breezeway, she removed their saddles and other tack and let the animals show her which stalls were their own. She checked their hooves for stones, made sure their automatic waterers were working, and gave them each a flake of hay. All the while, her thoughts were with Brad, and the stray dog lying in the back of Olivia’s rig.

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